Sunday, February 11, 2007

CNY Dish Recipe :賽螃蟹(Choy Pong Hai)

賽螃蟹(Choy Pong Hai) is a famous chinese dish that uses egg white to make it looks and tastes like crab meat, but we seldom heard it in Malaysia. There's a legend where one day the Qing Dynasty Empress Dowager Cixi wanted to eat crabs suddenly. They were far from the ocean, so there were no supply of crabs. An idea then came in. The chef used the egg white to produced a fake but alike and tasty crab meat. It was well loved by the Empress Dowager Cixi. This Shanghai-style dish was then spread and developed in China. If you are TVB fans and watched the 风凰四重奏 acted by Charmaine Sheh and Joe Ma, you should know this dish.

The main ingredients for this dish are eggs and fish meat.

You need to prepare 5 to 6 egg white depending on the eggs' size.First, beat the egg white till fluffy.

To make it easier and cleaner, I used a pack of vegetarian fish meat instead of using the real fish meat.

Boil 2 salted egg york and mash it together with the fish meat.

Next, fast boil the broccoli for decoration purpose.

After preparing all the ingredients, heat up the oil (you need quite a lot of it). Then, pour in the egg white and stir it fast and even. After that, add in the mashed fish meat.Cook for just one minute and it's ready to serve.

Tell you what, this 'Choy Pong Hai' tastes really really good and very similar to the real crab. Just imagine , by using only vegetarian fish meat, the taste was already superb. I guess it must have tasted even better using the real fish. Give this dish a try in this prosperity Chinese New Year! Gong Xi Fa Cai :)